With just seven more months of support left for Windows 7, the South Korean government is planning to migrate to Linux, according to the Korea Herald, which notes that the Interior Ministry will begin "test-running Linux on its PCs, and if no security issues arise, Linux systems will be introduced more widely within the government."

The Herald quotes the Interior Ministry as indicating that the transition to Linux, and the purchase of new PCs, would cost about 780 billion won ($655 million), but also anticipates long-term cost reductions with the adoption of Linux. The report doesn't mention a specific distro, instead "hopes to avoid building reliance on a single operating system."

"Before the government-wide adoption, the ministry said it would test if the system could be run on private networked devices without security risks and if compatibility could be achieved with existing websites and software which have been built to run on Windows," the report stated.

With just seven more months of support left for Windows 7, the South Korean government is planning to migrate to Linux, according to the Korea Herald, which notes that the Interior Ministry will begin "test-running Linux on its PCs, and if no security issues arise, Linux systems will be introduced more widely within the government.

Until now, Windows 7 was being used on government machines but the government wants to be future-proofed. That’s because Microsoft will pull the plug on the free technical support for the popular OS in January 2020.

For reference, Windows 7 was released back in 2009 and its mainstream support ended in 2015.

According to the Ministry of Interior and Safety, the switch won’t be made right away. First, the Linux-based OS will be tested for thorough compatibility with the existing software that’s meant for Windows. After successful testing, it will be implemented across the entire system.

Windows 7 support will end in January of next year, and that is a huge problem for both business and home users that are still running the aging operating system. Can't these people just upgrade to Windows 10? Well, yeah, but many just don't want to. Windows 10 has extreme telemetry that many people consider to be spying. As a result, they simply don't trust Microsoft's latest operating system. Not to mention, for businesses and organizations with many computers, the upgrade to Windows 10 could prove to be a costly affair.

And now, as a result of the upcoming death of Windows 7 support, the South Korean government has reportedly decided to ditch Microsoft Windows entirely. According to The Korea Herald, the Asian country's government will switch from Windows 7 to a Linux-based operating system.

Support for Windows 7 will end in January 2020. Microsoft probably hopes the moribund operating system's users will switch to Windows 10, but the South Korean government plans to switch its machines over to a Linux distribution instead, according to a May 17 report from The Korea Herald.

The report said testing Linux is supposed to help South Korea reduce the cost of maintaining its systems while also reducing its reliance on a particular operating system. Microsoft ending support for Windows 7 effectively forced the country to choose between updating to Windows 10, which will eventually meet the same fate, or exploring options that aren't controlled by a single entity. South Korea's government opted for the latter.

Some governments might have fallen out of love with Linux, but South Korea appears ready to start a torrid affair. The country’s Ministry of the Interior and Safety has outlined plans to switch government computers from Windows to Linux due to both lower costs and a reduced dependency on a single operating system

Microsoft Windows is the most used operating system in the world, at least when talking about desktop and laptop computers. In addition to the usual consumer and enterprise customers, it is also used in government offices and computers. That may have been the status quo but more and more governments are looking to other solutions for one reason or another. The latest to start that journey is South Korea, whose government is planning to migrate its computers to the open source operating system Linux.

Unfortunately for many users, Microsoft announced they will be ending support for Windows 7 on January 14th, 2020. Many companies and government institutions have held onto Windows 7 because of its stability, performance, and compatibility with older apps. Some businesses and organizations will be granted a slight extension, but many are moving on to other operating systems.

As reported by the Korea Herald, the nation's Interior Ministry last week announced plans for a potentially major Linux deployment as part of a plan to cut tech costs and reduce its reliance on a single operating system.

It's not known what mix of Windows 7 and Windows 10 the Korean government currently uses, however the plan to adopt Linux more widely comes as organizations around the world prepare for the end of Windows 7 support on January 14, 2020.

The government has opted for Linux instead of Windows 10 to save a significant amount of money Windows is a paid OS whereas Linux is a free, open-source operating system. It would cost around 780 billion won or 655 million dollars for switching to Linus platform and buying new PCs.

Another reason for this change is that the Linux platform has lesser security risks compared to Windows. This is the main factor that most of the enterprise networks around the world uses Linux based OS to run their machines.

A report from the Korean Herald stated, “Before the government-wide adoption, the ministry said it would test if the system could be run on private networked devices without security risks and if compatibility could be achieved with existing websites and software which have been built to run on Windows.”

It is not exactly clear which Linux distribution the South Korean Government are eyeing.

While specifics on what Linux distro they want to embrace are not available, it looks like the first step towards this migration to the open-source world is a security audit that should help the government determine if their data is protected or not.

The South Korean government is planning to switch its operating system (OS) from Windows to Linux, the Ministry of the Interior and Safety has announced.

According to the Korea Herald, the changeover will begin with a test-run of Linux OS on PCs within the Ministry of the Interior and Safety on private networked devices. Linux will be introduced more widely across government systems if a trial period passes with no issues arising with regards to security, or compatibility using software developed to run on Windows.

The Ministry of the Interior and Safety has confirmed it is making the change over cost concerns, as well as trying to stop the current stranglehold of a single operating system (ie Windows).

It was fairly inevitable that we'd get some switch-outs over the coming months, given that Windows 7 machines will need to be upgraded to Windows 10 (at cost) during the rest of the year, ahead of the older OS reaching end-of-life in January.

The document doesn't talk in terms of timetables, nor of which Linux distro or distros are favoured. Its Northern neighbour already uses a customised Linux distro called Red Star, but it got more security holes than an Emmental Facebook.

The cost of the changeover has been put at around $655m (£514m). It's not clear how much that will save, and when the break-even point will be.

Indeed, it's not inconceivable that Microsoft will throw money at South Korea in an attempt to change its mind. That's exactly what happened when Munich switched allegiance back in 2005-6.

In an effort to prepare for Windows 7's End of Life early next year, South Korea has revealed that all of its government computers will soon make the switch from Windows to Linux.

The official Windows 7 End of Life is set for January, 14 2020 and Microsoft has said that it will provide support for up to three years after that date though companies will need to pay.

However, for governments such as South Korea which depend on Windows 7, the cost of extended support could quickly become too high to manage. For example, support for Windows Enterprise users using Windows 7 for the first year after the End of Life date will cost $25 per device. This price rises to $50 per device for year two and $100 for year three.

The South Korean government believes Windows will be too expensive to support in the future, and in a bid to reduce costs the country plans to transition to the open-source Linux. While there will still be costs associated with support and new PCs, it's believed there will be both cost reductions and a reduced dependency on a single operating system.
Earlier this year, Microsoft signaled the end of support for Windows 7, which still powers many machines around the globe. Aside from shelling out serious cash for paid support, most users will have little choice but to migrate to a newer version of Windows.
However, South Korea has opted to change operating systems entirely, perhaps to Microsoft's dismay. The South Korean Ministry of Interior and Safety announced plans to migrate to Linux, starting with a trial of sorts to test for compatibility and security. Assuming there's no mishaps, a broad rollout could commence shortly thereafter.

The country’s Ministry of the Interior and Safety reckon that migrating away from Microsoft Windows will lower costs and reduce reliance on a single operating system.

With 2020 bringing the end of “free” support for Windows 7, a system widely used throughout the South Korean government, the timing is prudent.

There’s no word (yet) on what sort of Linux distribution South Korea might use (or whether the government would create its own) but let’s not put the cart before the horse: there are a few hurdles Linux needs to clear first…

The South Korean government will migrate all of its Windows computer hardware to Linux, according to statements made by the country’s interior and security minister, The Korea Herald.

The decision has been made with the cost savings as the main consideration, but also with the intention of recovering some technological independence. Windows 7, the operating system currently used in the South Korean Administration, is scheduled to end the support in January 2020 and spending prospects for what would be the natural upgrade to Windows 10, do not seem to enter the plans of the Executive.

Also, to the concern for the cost of continuing to maintain Windows, or what is the same, to the reduction that is expected to be obtained in the medium term once the migration has been completed, the preference is added not to continue relying on a only operating system , according to the statement by Choi Jang-hyuk, head of the Office of Digital Services of the ministry.

It will be in the Ministry of the Interior where Linux will begin to be tested, without determining what type of implementation will be carried out. The requirements that have transpired involve security tests on devices connected to private networks, compatibility with government websites and legacy software. The transition will have an investment of about 655 million dollars, including the purchase of new equipment.

More in Tux Machines

An Easy Fix for a Stupid Mistake

I waited a long time for Mageia 7 and for OpenMandriva Lx 4. When both distros arrived, I was very happy.
But new distros bring changes, and sometimes it is not easy to adapt. Mageia 7 has been rock-solid: it is doing a great job in my laptop and both in my daughter's desktop and in mine. There is one thing, though. I have been avoiding a strange mesa update that wants to remove Steam.
OpenMandriva is also fantastic, but this new release provided options like rock, release, and rolling. When I first installed the distro, I chose rock because I was shying away from the rolling flavor. Eventually, I had to move to rolling because that was the only way in which I could manage to install Steam in both my laptop and desktop machines.

today's leftovers

Intel's speedy Clear Linux distribution could be running under the hood of your car.
While we're fascinated by the performance of Intel's open-source Clear Linux distribution that it offers meaningful performance advantages over other distributions while still focused on security and offering a diverse package set, we often see it asked... who uses Clear Linux? Some argue that Clear Linux is just a toy or technology demo, but it's actually more.

Radeon ROCm 2.7.2 is now available as the newest update to AMD's open-source GPU compute stack for Linux systems.
ROCm 2.7.2 is a small release that just fixes the upgrade path when moving from older ROCm releases, v2.7.2 should now be running correctly. This release comes after the recent ROCm 2.7.1 point release that had corrected some components from properly loading the ROC tracer library.

There's an exciting patch set to GNOME Shell and Mutter now pending for finally wiring up the full-screen unredirected display / full-screen bypass compositing for helping the performance of full-screen games in particular on Wayland.
GNOME on X11 has long supported the full-screen compositing bypass so the window manager / compositor gets out of the way when running full-screen games/applications. That support under Wayland hasn't been in place and thus there is a performance hit for full-screen Wayland-native software. But now thanks to Red Hat's Jonas Ådahl, that infrastructure now appears to be ready.

After almost three years of research, planning and development we're proud to present the first public version of Xabber Server. Server is licensed under GNU AGPL v3 license, source code is available on GitHub. It is a fork of superb open source source XMPP server ejabberd by ProcessOne, with many custom protocol improvements an an all-new management panel.

After a summer hiatus during which I only released new packages for KDE Frameworks because they addressed a serious security hole, I am now back in business and just released KDE-5_19.09 for Slackware-current.
The packages for KDE-5_19.09 are available for download from my ‘ktown‘ repository. As always, these packages are meant to be installed on a full installation of Slackware-current which has had its KDE4 removed first. These packages will not work on Slackware 14.2. On my laptop with slackware64-current, this new release of Plasma5 runs smooth.

Later, the County official discovered that the two men were in fact, hired by the state court administration to try to "access" court records through "various means" to find out potential security vulnerabilities of the electronic court records.

The state court administration acknowledged that the two men had been hired, but said they were not supposed to physically break into the courthouse.

Mark M5BOP reports the complete set of amateur radio technical talks from this year's Martlesham Microwave Round Table is now available to watch on YouTube
Videos of these MMRT 2019 talks are available:
• Practical GNUradio - Heather Lomond M0HMO

On the road to change, you’ll encounter fear and loathing. People will undoubtedly cling to old ways of working. Successfully making it to the other side will require commitment, passionate change agents, and unwavering leadership. You might wonder – is it really worth it?
Leaders who have made the switch to agile project management say that it has delivered benefits both large and small to their organizations, from the rituals that bring their team together – like daily stand-ups – to the results that make their business stronger – like better end products and happier customers.

Borislav Petkov has taken to improve the Linux kernel's memset function with it being an area previously criticzed by Linus Torvalds and other prominent developers.
Petkov this week published his initial patch for better optimizing the memset function that is used for filling memory with a constant byte.

In addition to the work being led by DigitalOcean on core scheduling to make Hyper Threading safer in light of security vulnerabilities, IBM and Oracle engineers continue working on Kernel Address Space Isolation to help prevent data leaks during attacks.
Complementing the "Core Scheduling" work, Kernel Address Space Isolation was also talked about at this week's Linux Plumbers Conference in Lisbon, Portugal. The address space isolation work for the kernel was RFC'ed a few months ago as a feature to prevent leaking sensitive data during attacks like L1 Terminal Fault and MDS. The focus on this Kernel ASI is for pairing with hypervisors like KVM as well as being a generic address space isolation framework.

While Intel CPUs aren't shipping with 5-level paging support, they are expected to be soon and distribution kernels are preparing to enable the kernel's functionality for this feature to extend the addressable memory supported. With that, the mainline kernel is also looking at flipping on 5-level paging by default for its default kernel configuration.
Intel's Linux developers have been working for several years on the 5-level paging support for increasing the virtual/physical address space for supporting large servers with vast amounts of RAM. The 5-level paging increases the virtual address space from 256 TiB to 128 PiB and the physical address space from 64 TiB to 4 PiB. Intel's 5-level paging works by extending the size of virtual addresses to 57 bits from 48 bits.

Using open source software is commonplace, with only a minority of companies preferring a proprietary-first software policy. Proponents of free and open source software (FOSS) have moved to the next phases of open source adoption, widening FOSS usage within the enterprise as well as gaining the “digital transformation” benefits associated with open source and cloud native best practices.
Companies, as well as FOSS advocates, are determining the best ways to promote these business goals, while at the same time keeping alive the spirit and ethos of the non-commercial communities that have embodied the open source movement for years.

Releasing Slax 9.11.0

New school year has started again and next version of Slax is here too :) this time it is 9.11.0. This release includes all bug fixes and security updates from Debian 9.11 (code name Jessie), and adds a boot parameter to disable console blanking (console blanking is disabled by default).
You can get the newest version at the project's home page, there are options to purchase Slax on DVD or USB device, as well as links for free download.
Surprisingly for me we skipped 9.10, I am not sure why :)
I also experimented with the newly released series of Debian 10 (code name Buster) and noticed several differences which need addressing, so Slax based on Debian 10 is in progress, but not ready yet. Considering my current workload and other circumstances, it will take some more time to get it ready, few weeks at least.
Also: Slax 9.11 Released While Re-Base To Debian 10 Is In Development

Latest News

A Setback for FOSS in the Public (War) Sector, CONNECT Interoperability Project Shifting to the Private Sector

The Department of Defense has not fully implemented mandates from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) to increase its use of open-source software and release code, according to a September 10 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report.
The report notes that the 2018 NDAA mandated DoD establish a pilot program on open source and a report on the program’s implementation. It also says that OMB’s M-16-21 memorandum requires all agencies to release at least 20 percent of custom-developed code as open-source, with a metric for calculating program performance.
However, DoD has released less than 10 percent of its custom code, and had not developed a measure to calculate the performance of the pilot program. In comments to GAO, the DoD CIO’s office said there has been difficulty inventorying all of its custom source code across the department, and disagreement on how to assess the success for a performance measure. While the department worked to partially implement OMB’s policy, the department had not yet issued a policy.

The Defense Department has been slow to meet a government-wide mandate to release more open-source software code, as DOD officials have concerns about cybersecurity risks and are struggling to implement such a program across the department, according to a new audit.

The Department of Defense’s congressionally mandated efforts to create an open source software program aren’t going so well.
DOD must release at least 20 percent of its custom software as open source through a pilot required by a 2016 Office of Management and Budget directive and the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act. Open source software, OMB says, can encourage collaboration, “reduce costs, streamline development, apply uniform standards, and ensure consistency in creating and delivering information.”

The Defense Department has been slow to meet a government-wide mandate to release more open-source software code, as DOD officials have concerns about cybersecurity risks and are struggling to implement such a program across the department, according to a new audit. Since 2016, DOD has been required by law to implement an open-source software pilot program in accordance with policy established by the Office of Management and Budget.

The CONNECT project, an open source project that aims to increase interoperability among organizations, is transitioning from federal stewardship to the private sector and will soon be available to everyone.
Developed ten years ago by a group of federal agencies in the Federal Health Architecture (FHA), CONNECT was a response to ONC’s original approach to a health information network. The agencies decided to build a joint health interoperability solution instead of having each agency develop its own custom solution, and they chose to make the project open source.

Linux VR Headset

Since most VR Headsets support Windows platforms today, there are very few options for Linux users. Despite its support, many people have faced troubles setting up and running their Headsets on Linux. However, not anymore. The VR gaming experience is now getting better!
The all-new Xrdesktop is an open-source development that lets you work with various desktop environments like GNOME and KDE. Since this project is under progress right now, we can hope for more features like Steam, Valve and other platforms for gaming and Virtual Reality experience.
In addition, the Xrdesktop will also offer integration with Windows as well. Once completed, it will be a great step towards traditional Linux desktop environments. The program is available for installation in both packages for Ubuntu Linux and Arch Linux.